Microbiology of Infectious Disease
This book is to tell a story and get a sense of how each organism evolved, what it can do, and how it interacts with its environment, and describes how they infect plants and animals but particularly humans.
Abstract
In the late 1990s, the first complete sequences of two bacterial genomes were published. From the analysis of the sequence data, it became possible to elucidate all the biochemical reactions that these bacteria could undertake and all the molecules that they could synthesize, many of which had hitherto been unknown. Now that hundreds of microbial genomes have been sequenced, we can decipher those biochemical features that make an organism a successful pathogen and recognize common strategies for overcoming host defences. We also can get insights to how each pathogen evolved. The objective of this book is to put the new sequence-derived information in the context of the natural history of the organisms. That is, to tell a story and get a sense of how each organism evolved, what it can do, and how it interacts with its environment. Each chapter is devoted to a different pathogen, be it viral, bacterial or eukaryotic, and describes how they infect plants and animals but particularly humans.